


Words of my Mouth

by Kass



Series: The Sentinel fanworks [46]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Blowjobs, Days of Awe, Holiday, Judaism, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-04
Updated: 2008-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-02 01:46:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/pseuds/Kass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"May the words of my mouth..." My second TS Days of Awe story, 2002.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words of my Mouth

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lanning, who egged me on, and to Sihaya, for the speedy and thorough beta-read.

Even with his sleepshade on, Jim sensed the moon. At least, that had been Sandburg's explanation for why Jim only ever seemed to sleep until the alarm went off a couple of nights per month: he slept better at moon-dark.

Sandburg had hung a lunar calendar—a narrow strip of black paper with the months, and little moon icons, marked on it in white—on the refrigerator door. Jim hadn't paid much attention to it. When it first went up, Sandburg had said something about the Jewish months being lunar, but it went in one ear and out the other. Mostly Jim just enjoyed knowing when he could count on a few good nights of sleep in a row. Hoped there wouldn't be any stake-outs during that brief window of real dark. That kind of thing.

Today, despite the fact that the calendar showed the barest sliver of new moon, Jim awoke half an hour early. When he stretched out his senses to see what might have woken him up, he heard the faintest of whisperings from downstairs. Not words, exactly, just...sounds. Shushed.

Sandburg, it turned out, was sitting in lotus position on a floor pillow in his bedroom. With a beeswax candle burning, and his eyes closed. And his mouth was moving. Jim stood there a while and watched him through the crack in the frame of the new bedroom door.

Part of Jim wanted to stay there, watching, as long as the opportunity lasted. But the part of his brain that was ashamed of his voyeurism took control, and his attention wrenched away from the rise and fall of Sandburg's chest and back to the near-sound that had woken him up.

Meditation was nothing new, but Sandburg didn't usually whisper his mantra out loud at 6am. Shaking his head, Jim padded into the kitchen to make coffee.

* * *

"So that's the deal." Two mugs of joe and four Eggo waffles later. When a tiny charm sounded on his alarm clock, Sandburg had stopped...whatever he was doing, and had peeked out to investigate the smell of coffee only seconds later. Then he'd apologized, and then he'd explained.

It was the first of the lunar month of Elul. Forty days to seek the divine "Beloved" in the cornfields of the spirit, or some crazy thing like that. Psalm 27. The obligation to pray aloud: loud enough to hear the sound of your own whisper, even in silent prayer.

Jim stood, stretched, and carried his dishes to the sink.

"Sorry I woke you up," Sandburg said, again.

"You planning to say that forty times, too?"

His room-mate looked startled for a second, then grinned. "Guess not."

Jim headed for the shower, and he heard Sandburg washing the dishes as he toweled himself dry, and then it was time for the work day and they went their separate ways.

* * *

By the third morning, Jim had timed the coffee pot to finish dripping just as Sandburg's chime tolled softly.

By day six, Jim spent the hour sitting at the kitchen table in his robe, breathing the scent of coffee, trying to make out the syllables in Sandburg's not-quite-voice.

That was a Friday, and by some quirk of fate they were both home that night. Sandburg peeled garlic and chopped onions for a bolognese sauce, and after dinner they wound up flipping television channels and drinking their second glasses of red wine.

Predictably, television sucked. Casting about for conversation that wasn't related to work, Jim asked how the morning praying thing was going.

"It's good." Sandburg swirled the wine in his glass reflectively, then took a long swallow. "I'm really trying to get in the spirit this year. Really prepare for the Days of Awe."

Jim nodded, as if people said that to him all the time. He hit the mute button on the remote control.

"You know, the New Year and the Day of Atonement," Sandburg continued, as if Jim hadn't nodded. The clarification was kind of a relief, although Jim wasn't about to tell him that.

"So what're you atoning for?"

That turned out to be an interesting question, because it sent Sandburg on a tangent about the Talmudic rabbis and their discussions about forgiveness. Something about asking other people for forgiveness before you up and asked God. Which was all fine, as far as it went, but Jim had the feeling the digression was hiding something.

"--anyway, the interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas," Sandburg was saying, and Jim cut him off.

"Spare me the dissertation, Chief. You didn't answer my question."

Sandburg's face flushed a little. Ha: gotcha. Although it made him feel quietly sleazy after the fact, given how his brain made use of the mental image when he was lying alone in bed, he liked making Sandburg blush now and then.

"Well, I haven't really done anything...reprehensible in the last year."

"No petty drug offenses or double-booking dates or anything like that?"

Sandburg grinned back at him. "You're so full of shit, man." There was a pause while they both slugged back some wine. "You know, the word 'cheyt,' usually translated as 'sin,' is actually an archery term meaning 'to miss the mark.'"

"So what marks have you missed?"

This time Sandburg looked down into his glass as if he expected answers there and not just dregs. "I might...not have been as forthcoming as I could've been."

His tone was quieter. Something in Jim latched on to that; he felt the conversation shift, the way an interrogation shifts when the truth's about to be revealed. Not that this was an interrogation. Hell, no; just a friendly conversation on the sofa over some wine. The muted television was still ricocheting images off each other, and it was distracting; Jim reached for the remote and turned it off.

"About...?"

Sandburg bit back what might have been a grimace, or a nervous laugh. "About who I date."

The fine hairs on the back of Jim's neck stood on end. "So come forth, already."

Sandburg shot Jim a glance he couldn't read. "I'm not totally straight," he said, after a long pause.

Jim shrugged. "So? Nobody is."

That wasn't what Sandburg had expected him to say; he could tell. He felt a little smug, actually. He liked exceeding Sandburg's expectations, when he didn't stop to think about whether the low expectations were insulting. He reached for the bottle on the coffee table and poured himself a final half-glass of wine.

"Okay, so we're all a little gay?" Sandburg's tone was studiously casual. Still testing the waters.

Jim took a long swig of wine; thought, what the fuck. "I sure as hell am."

Bull's-eye. He could feel the heat rising up through Sandburg's body, coloring his face. Jim leaned back and crossed his feet at the ankles. He'd forgotten how much fun flirting was.

"Hold that thought." Sandburg stood, crossed the room, closed the bathroom door. Jim listened idly to the sounds of water, the toilet flushing, Sandburg washing his hands. The next words came from behind him, as Sandburg was returning to the living room.

"So...am I on crack, or did we just both come out?"

"I don't know what you're on." Jim tried to sound like he was grumbling, but he was buzzy from the wine and quietly excited to have gotten the coming-out thing finally out of the way, and mostly just succeeded in sounding amused.

Sandburg sat at the far end of the couch. "Wow. You want to talk about money?"

Jim blinked. "What?" Sandburg was the king of non sequiturs.

"They always say the big three are God, sex, and money. We're two for two."

"Thanks, but no thanks, Chief." Jim downed the last of his wine.

The conversation veered back towards religion. Because it was a safer topic than sex, especially now that Jim had to reevaluate every interaction they'd ever had in light of the new awareness that they were both potentially interested in each other.

Scratch that: in light of the new awareness that Sandburg might possibly be interested in him, because he knew _he_ was interested. Had been from the start. Every time he thought about it, his skin prickled slightly. Felt amazing.

As his watch ticked past eleven, they were talking about the New Year again. Resolutions. Meditations. Assorted year's-end stuff. It was getting late: time to be a little less subtle.

"Well, Chief, if you ask me, the worst thing to be thinking of at the end of a year is regrets."

They were only inches apart now. Jim could taste the sourness of the wine on Sandburg's breath, could hear the rocketing thump of his heartbeat.

"Yeah, or mistakes."

"This look like a mistake to you?" Unconsciously, Jim held his breath and leaned forward slightly, waiting. Hoping like hell he knew what Sandburg was going to do.

And then releasing the breath in a delighted whoosh when Sandburg grinned at him, murmured "Now that you mention it...no," and closed the gap between them by closing his mouth over Jim's.

* * *

They necked on the couch for a while, which was pretty fucking great: getting hard nice and slow, feeling Sandburg's body all over his, learning which touches made Sandburg ticklish and which made him melt against Jim's chest and which made him sigh into Jim's mouth.

When Jim's neck started to cramp, he pulled back and muttered "bed" in Sandburg's ear, and they untangled themselves, and Sandburg pulled him through the door into his room.

It was dark, and cluttered with stacks of books and files of papers, but Jim tugged his shirt off and dropped it on the floor, by which time Sandburg was naked and pushing him onto the futon.

Jim lay back and closed his eyes and reveled in the feeling of big hands pulling his sweatpants away, and then in the even better feeling of a condom sliding onto his dick, and then the best-of-all feeling of his dick slipping into Sandburg's mouth. The fact that the hot, eager suction was coming from his room-mate—his room-mate who he'd believed was straight all these months, his room-mate about whom he'd fantasized more than once—made his whole body tingle. Or maybe that was what Sandburg was doing with his tongue.

"Yeah," Jim murmured, encouraging. "Oh, yeah —"

He'd been going to ask Sandburg to do that again, but Sandburg had done it without his asking, and suddenly the pleasure was too much: Jim was inhaling hard and coming even harder.

When he could think again, he became aware that Sandburg was lying on his back beside him, right hand idly stroking up and down his dick. Even sentinel vision grayed out in this kind of dark—the room had no windows, not a sliver of moon—but he could make out Sandburg's hand pumping his shadow erection, and the sight made his mouth water.

"You got another condom?"

"Bedside drawer," Sandburg murmured, and Jim heard his heartbeat quicken as he reached over him to rummage through whatever other junk was in there.

He still didn't like the taste of latex, but he could mostly ignore it, focusing on the feel of Sandburg's body under his hands, the way Sandburg's cock twitched as he slid it into his mouth. The heft of it under his tongue.

Sandburg turned out to be a talker, which might have been embarrassing in the light of day but was amazingly hot in the dark. "Ohh," he murmured, and then "oh, God, yes," and then "awwww, Jim, your _mouth._" As though he were narrating the experience to himself.

Jim tried sliding a finger back down over his balls, carefully because not everybody got off on being touched there, and Sandburg moaned more. "There, there, there, yeah, right _there_"—he was almost chanting—and when Jim pushed his finger inside, Sandburg groaned and stiffened and came.

Some moments later, both condoms having been disposed of, Jim spooned around Sandburg, burying his face in the back of Sandburg's neck and breathing deep. Everything seemed to be sparkling with a delicious post-coital glow.

They could do this again. They could wake up and do it again. They could try hands: there's all kinds of things you can do with hands. They could come home from work and eat dinner and neck on the couch. They could fuck. Idly, Jim wondered what kinds of sounds Sandburg would make while Jim was fucking him. Whether he'd gasp. Whether he'd beg.

Better yet, what sounds Sandburg would make while he was fucking Jim. Despite his sleepiness, Jim's dick twitched at the thought.

Sandburg grinned against his arms, placed a small kiss there, and seemed burrowed for sleep.

In the morning, Jim realized, he could lie in bed and listen to Sandburg's meditations. Maybe make out the words this time, from right here, up close, in the same room.

And then he'd make pancakes. And maybe then they'd mess around again.

He liked that idea.

As he drifted towards sleep, Jim felt a wash of tenderness. He hoped Sandburg would get whatever it was he'd been praying for.

Jim sure as hell had.


End file.
